Detangling little strand of hair caught in my earring suddenly becomes a fight to the death

Suddenly colleagues jokes are no longer funny

Fight fellow commuters in a faux polite way for the last seat in your carriage

Best part is when you get home and come through from the front door. From the hallway I start taking things off including jewellery and get into my default setting of kaftan and a headscarf. I have heard this might be a no-no when in a relationship so I am enjoying it while I can!

Taking off your bra is one of the best feelings in the world known to womankind. Do not know how women of old handled corsets. No wonder they were always fainting!

Anyway I digress. The trick now is to look after myself more so that I'm tired less and stop falling ill all the time. So wish me luck!

Feelings all over the pace this morning. I think it's an aftershock from this week.

Got the news earlier this week that a member of my extended family is a child molesting paedo rapist monster and I still feel sick.

Where do you even start? First of all is to make sure that the victim is okay and receiving couselling but in Nigeria how do you take someone like that down? Especially after the duration of over a decade. Also at the same time he is still somebody's husband and father. How do they deal with all of this? My head can't contemplate.

With that running in the background, focusing on the day to day is weird. I am looking at things in a different light. Ah only God can sort this out oh.

You can imagine how I felt when I got asked on a date for last night. Automatic reaction was to say no but a) the man has been a perfect gent and I would feel like an uber bitch saying no for no reason and b) after breaking up with my ex last November I had to activate my re-set button.

So first of all he was late, then in waiting for him, I then became late and when I got to the restaurant and called I couldn't see him even though he was parked on the street. Turned out he broke his car key while locking the door :( Na wa oh!

In the end we did have a nice enough date chatting and laughing for about an hour but it was always at the back of our minds that he lives an hour away and has no car. In the end he got pliers from a shop and used it to turn the key in the ignition and that brought the date to an end because no one is taking a risk of turning the engine off again.

I have promised that I will see him again and even though I didn't feel any butterflies and I wish he had made a little more effort with his apperance, I'm still glad I went :)

So this week I have lost way more trust in mankind, will invest heavily in nanny cams and I have pressed the re-set button.

I'm writing.
I'm writing.
I'm writing something and very soon I will click 'publish' and it will be the first post in 13 months.

I do know that this is pretty basic stuff but the excitement is quite tremendous. I have broken my long streak of unanimated creative laziness and I'm thankful to God for it.

It's crazy how much something can be important to you. I found that there is an actual detriment to myself when I am not writing and it is a hobby that I don't want to lose because to lose it would be to lose a big part of myself.

I don't even know if this will ping on anybody's radar but 'Happy New Year' if you are one of the five people reading this!!!

Let's see if I can do a quick 2015 re-cap before it fades into the random shadows of my memory.

Had a very stressful restructure and work and now have a new job at work.

If you used to read this ancient blog back in the day, you would see that I have an obsession for Agatha Christie and a lot of old world crime books.

A lot of the time, the killer would be caught or a major plot change would happen that would give you a clue all because of...LOVE LETTERS!

How I could scoff and turn my nose up at the women. What is wrong with these women I would wonder? Why are you keeping your old love letters tied up in a bundle in the bottom of some secret hideaway? Don't you know you are being a wet sop?

I honestly never understood why people would hold on to old history like that.

Until now.

Now I am the stupid woman.

I'm not even sure the 21st century woman owns love letters! Or any letters of any kind (apart from horrid letters from the bank). But I do. For a glorious moment over the course of two years I met the man I call 'The Prototype', and before BBM/Whatspp etc, we wrote to each other via email nearly everyday.

Now he had a way with words, a God given talent and there are some letters he wrote and they would make all my senses marvel.

Now everything has changed, and he will soon officially belong to another. So the question of the day is, do you still keep the letters (emails)?

I let the email account stay dormant for three years but I unearthed it today and when I read the correspondence I felt happy and sad at the same time.

Now does one just delete everything and walk away in a blaze of triumphant practical glory or do you keep the the words that made you feel like the most precious thing on earth at that given time?

Also by keeping it, are you just holding yourself back? Or are you tempted to hold them because you doubt anyone will ever say those type of words about you again?

I'm so confused! My head hurts.

What I am very sure about though, is that I will never again scoff at those fictional heroines and villainesses of old and their bundle of hidden love letters.

So I thought that my biggest issue with getting back in the dating pool was that I had to you know...care? Get excited. Get dressed even. Make sure that my work clothes could be passable for drinks or coffee in the city.

WRONG!

That's nothing compared to the actual interaction with men. Whooosh!

Making small talk. That's an art form in itself. Ah my goodness. I have that mastered a bit though. Then realising slowly that there are a lot of uneducated people on the streets. Not in the book sense, but in the closed mind 'I don't want to learn about anything past 21 sense'.

Someone said I was using big words to make a point when I said 'monosyllabic'. Another said that cancer was a white person's disease.

I'm not making any of this stuff up.

Then you pass the initial chit chat stage and go for a date and to be fair, there might not be any issues at all. It's just that there is no connect.

Or you might go for a date and really like a guy, make plans for a second date, book tickets, make reservations and EVERYTHING. Then they vanish into thin air like a mystery that needs to be solved in an Agatha Christie novel.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING BANKER, coming to a book store near you! For real though I hope he's not dead shah.

So yeah. Getting back out there is hard but I'm glad I am resisting the lure of stretchy jogging bottoms and head scarf and getting out there.

Shout out to all the men and women out there trying to make decent small talk!

So I have to be delicate while typing this, so try and follow if you can.

My friend and I were discussing something yesterday when a bit of reminiscing came up. Now my friend in question is a guy and lives in Nigeria. We've been friends for over five years and there has always been an attraction but nothing deep (read emotional) came from it. When I visited in January we hung out and had an 'interlude' which I thought was all sort of awesome.

Until yesterday.

When he said xyz happened, WHICH NEVER DID.

I can swear on my life that what he said happened did not occur but he swears it did. Logically I can even prove he was wrong but I didn't have the heart to prolong the torture over BBM. This now begs the question, has he forgotten or even worse, is he mixing me up with another woman? Oh my days! The pain! I was so hurt. Nothing like a cold dose of reality to slap you awake. I don't have much of an ego but the small one I had got completely decimated yesterday I can tell you that for free.

To add salt to the wound, he then concludes from the mystical happening, something about my state of mind. Even though I have said time and time again that it's not true. So that didn't help. I felt like I had been in front of a jury on trumped up charges. It was a sad day yesterday man.

So apologies if this doesn't make sense, you have my sympathy. The long and short of it is, I thought I was special and I'm not, also I need to re-adjust my thinking when it come to men.
For a smart girl, I'm still not quite there with understanding them.

I did get quite upset but a chat to my friends and a dose of the BBC's version of Pride and Prejudice went a long way to my recovery!

It's only when something is taken from you that you realise you had taken in for granted.

It's been almost a year since I last posted anything and you would laugh if you saw my drafts folder. I always started a post but never finished it and it would just lay there like literary bones in an elephant's graveyard.

I would peek in from time to time but my writing spirit was crushed. Why?

A mixture of some very nasty family altercations last year September (my birthday weekend actually) and the stress and slow creeping misery of work earlier this year.

I knew that if I wrote what was in my heart, then I would either be carted off to a psych ward or my I would have irrevocably damaged the relationship between myself and my folks.

So I stopped writing and I apologise to anyone who came checking for me from time to time.

Flash forward to Wednesday afternoon, I just clicked on my link to check something and I realised that my url of www.misscarameld.com didn't work any more. I couldn't access my site from the new address and the old diary of a lost one address either. See pure panic in action! I had tears and everything. I also realised that I had never backed up 5 years of writing either!

I emailed Google and asked a friend for advice ten today, I realised I got get into my blogger/google account if I could remember my Google password. From there I deleted both old accounts and changed my site name again!

I think I am going to stick to a blogspot address for a while. I'm not good at hosting my own site!!

So I have a situation where my life is on a stagnant pause. I believe it is a waste of a life. People are dying everyday at every age and I find it hard to be bothered about my own existence. So in the last few days of 31 I am trying to shake myself up a bit.

So if you are one of the hardy few who read this never ending epistle from time to time. You will have to bear with me because as I force myself to try and change, this will be the medium where all the 'my Lord what were you thinking', will be happening.

You see it has to be here because I tend to 'think out loud' online and I have been told to muzzle myself as it might be unseemly (more on that later). Well yee hah I have a blog!

So what will I be trying to sort?

Health: I had pneumonia a few years back and that means that I can pick up a random cough and turn it into Godzilla. The weight of my boobies ain't helping my breathing patterns when I'm ill and asleep so the weight really has to go. And stay away! I'm really fat (for real).

Job: Need a new one. Need to make enough time from the current one, to find a new one. I'm bored and I'm broke!

Man: I want one. A good one.

That list is in order of priority. But I'm trying to attack all three at roughly the same time as I find all three feed into one another in one way or another.

So again, if the blog becomes a three trick pony. Just hang in there ;)

July was a 'trying' month. I held off here because I couldn't do with just writing and writing about bad stuff. I have learned a few things though. They include:

When next my Mum travels for a month, she can leave either her husband or her son. She can't leave both for me!

As a former pneumonia sufferer, I am apparently prone to chest and throat infections and can no longer utter the words, 'it's just a little cough, no need to see the doctor'.

If you have loved ones that you don't see often. Appreciate the small times you do get to see them as that could be the last time you see them alive. Next thing you know, you are getting a phone call that a young man who you saw smiling and laughing a year ago is dead. May the soul of my cousin and the souls of the all the faithful departed rest in peace. Eternal life grant them oh Lord and let perpetual light shine on them. May their souls rest in peace, Amen.

My aunty called me and told me she was checking on me because my Dad had said I was really upset over my cousin. Now this is my correct Aunty who calls from Naija all the time so I was really happy to hear from her. She then said from nowhere "I have found your husband! This one I mark 100%"....

Oh dear.

She then preceded to tell me about the guy's Mum who is her in-law and how awesome she is and how fabulous the guy is and how I should play nice. As I type this, I have just realised that I don't even know the guy's name. If past history is anything to go by, this is not going to end well. Don't believe me? OK take a seat dear one and read on...

First time I had the unfortunate experience of being hooked up, it was by an over zealous woman who thought that she could score points with my Dad by hooking up his only daughter. She lied to me and asked for my email to send something for my Dad and then proceeded to tell me that there is this guy who works for First Bank in Awka ( I think) and that he would really REALLY like to talk to me. This woman badgered me to death before I agreed. We then swapped emails. Now this was a while ago and I can't remember the details, but later I got an email from the guy asking me what was wrong with me. Why would a young woman in London be looking for a guy in Nigeria? Was I ugly or desperate? I swear this is the truth! I finished this guy eh, then turned my wrath on the woman and reported her to my Dad too. I'm sure I blogged about it and if I find the link I will add.

Second time I was sitting with my bestie at home one evening when my mobile phone just rang. I said hello, and then a guy speaking in the purest old school Igbo that would make village men sound like Prince Charles introduced himself to me, that he was from so so and so village and that my Aunty Oby gave him my number to introduce himself. Now I only have two Oby's in my family. One is my cousin (near my age) and the second one is my uncle's wife in Birmingham and in a million years she would never give out my number. SO I was baffled. He said his father also knew my Dad. So as politely as possible (cos I was sure I was speaking to a 60 yr old man) I told him to get more information from his Dad before I could speak to him. This guy kept calling and the more he called, the more 'Igbotic' he sounded. He also told me that he was a cleaner and he had no papers. At this point, I smelt a rat as he said he was happy being a cleaner. No Nigerian man could EVER say that. I stopped picking up the calls. I later found out that it was my aunty in Nigeria who had changed her name after repenting her former life, that had given my number. I WAS LIVID! I called her sister in London and ranted and raved!! When I got to Naija for my Grandma's funeral my Aunty was very apologetic, she said she got so carried away that she didn't even think to ask me even though her sister warned her I wouldn't like it. I then said to her but what kind of Papa are you attaching me to? She was shocked! She told me that the guy was a young man, degree holding British citizen who worked for the UK Border Agency!!!! Let me tell you all, I believe this guy has either a white or West Indian girlfriend who he wants to marry and the Papa did not agree and I was the muppet caught in the middle. I DO NOT LIKE SUCH. If I ever see the guy, I will tell him off so badly because that was just underhanded and mean.

Third time, my Dad's cousin told my Mum that his friend in China (yes that's right, China), wanted to get to know me. At this point I told my Mum I don't want oh! my Mum now begged me. So mumu like myself gave my number. At this point I was off sick with laryngitis so with the crazy time difference, the only time he could call was in the afternoon. The conversation would not flow and I was bored. I kept trying to introduce a topic and it would just be monosyllabic answers, but he still kept calling. So when I got better, I told him that I was going back to work so he better give me his Whatsapp or BBM or Facebook. I wasn't all that bothered to be fair but my uncle kept calling my Mum and harassing me. How can the guy start seriously dodging? Even going so far as to say that his computer was being fixed so he was off Facebook? Muahahahaha! In China you no get smartphone? That was when I signed off trying to be polite. he called one afternoon at work and of course I missed it. That was the end of that. I told my uncle I'm not stupid.

Last one shouldn't even get a mention but it is a cautionary tale of the fact that mad people plenty. I have mentioned on this blog before how there was a mad woman stalking me at church. She kept going on and on about her she wanted me to meet her husband's best friend. Can I mention that I did not know her from Eve but as fellow Igbo people in our church we were automatically besties! After dodging her Jack Bauer style for 5 months she finally got me in front of our priest. God is so good, I had my office mobile on me and gave her that number. That's how this dry man from Wales started calling me. Could not hold a single serious conversation. Only kept going on about how he had a Law Masters degree. Awesome! So now what? *silence*. Back in church I told this lady I'm not interested, that is when the full on stalking started. Calling me all the time, coming to different masses to try and get me, even sending her husband to accost me in the church car park. I flipped one day, called him on the phone and told him to tell his wife to back off. This was last September. How can in January she started again. She then told my Mum she was popping in for coffee, lo and behold, in she comes with the guy and her husband. I served them drinks and carried my hand bag and walked out. In all the drinks serving time, Mr Wales didn't once even look at me to say yo. So when I left he asked my Mum for permission to date me! HEHEHEEHHOHOHOHOHOHO. I laugh in Chinese. My Mum told him that that isn't how we operate as I a grown woman who knows my own mind. She was shocked! The look on her face when I got home was priceless! Later she pulled the woman aside and told her to chill. My Mum got angry because the lady had been telling people in our church that I was stringing her along. I had to ask if I was the last Igbo woman in the UK?

So dearly beloved, I have been minding my business and all this wahala has been at my door. It may actually be beneficial to my health to find a significant other so people can leave me alone. You can see why I am about to hide behind the couch until this wave of hook ups pass!

Please ladies has this happened to you? Guys too, are you in the danger zone?

NAIJA FOR LIFE

A bit about me...

I'm a thirty year old nutcase who is torn between her love of two countries and trying to get ahead in life. I love music,dancing, tv and movies. Cannot stand fake people but love fake hair!! Fighting through the lows and loving the highs.VIBRANT, VOLUPTOUS AND VIVACIOUS! I'm pure Caramel Delight !